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Institute
The Social War (91-88 BCE) is one of the most significant episodes in Roman history: from this war, in which Rome fought against her Italic allies, emerged the elite that would lead the Republic in the last decades of its existence and that would provide the senatorial aristocracy of the early imperial age. The Italic rebels were defeated militarily, yet they achieved their political aims. As such, this war – and its elaboration and memorialization in Roman cultural memory – provides a very interesting case study about how "victory" and "defeat" are constructed discursively after a disruptive war, and how its narration is "functionalized" for a re-foundation of the civic body.
Preface
(2020)
Introduction
(2020)
In 1932, Grace Harriet Macurdy, Professor of Greek at Vassar College, wrote about Cleopatra’s and Marc Antony’s lifestyle in Egypt: In a manner of living as though taken from the Arabian Nights Entertainment, they gambled, drank, hunted and fished together, and wandered about Alexandria by night in disguise. . . Even Macurdy – the author of a pioneering study on Hellenistic queens and ‘woman-power’, in which she stressed the necessity of evaluating powerful women by the same standards as their male counterparts – could not avoid using an Orientalist flair when describing the most famous Ptolemaic queen. It is the aim of this book to show that Macurdy was and is anything but alone, and that discourses and images developed by the Orientalist imagination have dominated the ways in which powerful ancient women have been represented in modern reception. The reason for this, we argue, is...
The Tetrarchy as Ideology
(2023)
Introduction
(2022)
Theme Park Imitations
(2022)
Theme parks frequently draw not only on historical themes, from antiquity to the roaring twenties, but also on their own history – that is, the history of the medium of the theme park itself. This article uses the example of the Happy World ride at Happy Valley Beijing (China) to discuss theme park imitations, that is, the fact that theme parks frequently borrow individual elements (themes, technologies, visuals, layouts, names) and/or entire units (rides, restaurants, themed areas) from each other. Opened in 2014 in the Greek-themed Aegean Harbour section of Happy Valley Beijing, Happy World may upon first sight look like an almost exact copy of Disney’s ‘it’s a small world’ (opened at Disneyland in California in 1966) but turns out to be, upon closer examination, a complex refunctionalization of central elements of ‘it’s a small world’ that establishes meaningful connections between (ancient) Greece and the city of Beijing via the theme of the Olympic Games: drawing on the origins of ‘it’s a small world’ in the 1964–5 New York World’s Fair and the latter’s motto of ‘Peace through Understanding’, Happy World takes visitors on a journey from the ancient Olympiad to contemporary Beijing (the site of the 2008 Summer and the 2022 Winter Olympic Games) to offer a theme park rendition of the 2008 Olympic torch relay as an homage to ‘the spirit [of peace, respect, and friendship] in the people’s [sic] of the world’.